Mobile Web Insights – Addressing Disproportionate Usage

by Mayur Pitamber, Product Marketing Strategist

Recent industry analyst reports predict European mobile internet traffic will grow by a factor of 32 between 2010 and 2015 – driven primarily by the popularity of smartphones and mobile broadband devices (dongles, netbooks and tablets). Analysts predict actual revenues from mobile internet services will grow at a much slower pace.

Demand for high-bandwidth services like video means that operators must balance costly capacity upgrades against consumer backlash from quality-of-service (QoS) issues.

As unlimited data tariffs make less and less economic sense to operators, users of mobile internet services will need to change their expectations and, in some cases, modify their online behavior. To avoid churn, operators will need to become experts in usage-based tariffs and pricing plans that are better aligned with subscriber needs and network availability.

What follows is based on real subscriber data from "Operator Y," a tier-one European mobile network operator with approximately 30 million wireless subscribers.

Figure 1 below shows that 2.5% of users accounts for 70% of data volume on Operator Y’s mobile network. These users fit the market segment called Extreme Users: users consuming an average of 50.4MB per day. Extreme Users generate almost three times more data than the segment referred to as Heavy Users, almost nine times more data than Medium Users, and nearly 70 times more data than Light Users.

Figure 1: Subscriber classification by data usage

Extreme Users place a huge demand on network resources, resulting in increased costs and an often slower internet experience for other users. According to our data, behind almost every case of extreme usage is an unlimited data plan and a high-end smartphone.
Operator Y can proactively mitigate these problems by using Analytics to extract data directly from the data path and identify subscriber groups by the amount of data consumed, when peak consumption occurs, and then by device, content or application.

This information can be turned into usage-based classifications and integrated with industry-standard
market segmentation information to further enrich the profiles and better match certain segments with the appropriate data plans.

Openwave Analytics can also drive usage policies that compress and optimize the data. Network optimization can be built into data plan management. Extreme Users, for example, could be up-sold to “premium” plans with higher quality-of-service (QoS) levels and data allowances. Customer engagements of this sort would be handled with seamless, intuitive notifications that give users full control of their plans.

If at least 30% of Extreme Users sign-up for a premium plan, then Operator Y may start experiencing less network congestion and a healthier bottom line from this costly segment. Operator Y could also offer alternative plans with lower data allowances and QoS levels to other subscriber segments.

This is an excerpt from the Fall edition of our Mobile Web Insights Report, an ongoing look at real trends from real customer data. Download the entire report (.pdf).